


Unweighted

by Island_of_Reil



Category: The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Genre: Anonymous Sex, Bath Houses, Bath Sex, Bittersweet Ending, Class Differences, Coronation Ceremony 2017, Dirty Talk, M/M, Voice Kink, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-12-20 06:15:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11914914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: The Gentlemen’s Baths of Cetho are a place where one may take his pleasure unweighted: by clothing, by name, by family, or by duty.





	Unweighted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DachOsmin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DachOsmin/gifts).



“Art coming or not?” Sotha demanded testily. Lenet, nerves twanging in his chest and gut, set his ears and hastened after him into the narrow, shadowed street behind the busy stalls and kiosks of the Edrethelemeise Marketplace.

The building was large and of nondescript brick in need of remortaring. The door was equally unimpressive, as was the sign next to it: _Gentlemen’s Baths,_ in unornamented inch-high white lettering upon a black plaque. Sotha, to Lenet’s surprise, turned the knob and opened the door easily.

“No doorman?” Lenet whispered.

Sotha rolled his eyes. “No. No doorman, no locks, no secret password, no blood oath, no promise to hand over thy first-born son.”

Lenet did not reply, but he chafed at the sarcasm. He’d never been to one of these establishments before; how was he supposed to know they did not take great care in whom they let in? The Edretantheise laws against “public indecency” were still in effect, and one need only browse the logs of the Vigilant Brotherhood printed in the newspapers to see how indulgently young men sporting with young ladies in semi-public places were treated in comparison with young men sporting with one another. Back home in Csedo, the Vigilants had taken exceptional glee in apprehending the latter and announcing their names publicly. Sotha had scoffed at Lenet’s fears when they’d first discussed the baths last week, but Sotha, Lenet thought, was too confident for his own good at times.

The foyer was cool, dim, and quiet. An elf of about twenty years sat behind the front desk, eyeing Sotha and Lenet but looking as though he were thinking less about them than about whatever he had planned after his shift. Behind the desk were shelves piled with towels in varying patterns and colors.

Sotha approached the deskman, Lenet following. “Good afternoon,” Sotha said, slipping into court diction.

“And to you,” the deskman said with a marked Outer Cetho accent. He had more earrings in each ear than Lenet had ever seen on anyone outside the courier fleet, mainly crystal pendants that chimed together with his slightest movements. His eyes were a brilliant violet-blue, and his hair was an elaborate knot of braids held together with tiny gold lamé cords and tashin sticks that almost passed for real gold.

Sotha pulled a silver half-zhas from his pocket and laid it on the desk, then gave Lenet an expectant look. Lenet had been prepared for this, at least: he placed his own half-zhas down on the pitted wooden surface.

The deskman swept both coins perfunctorily into his hand, his ears tinkling, then ushered them into a drawer. He stood and turned, chiming again, to take down two towels from the shelves. The one he handed to Lenet bore faded red and white stripes, and it was not quite worn enough for the ragpile but heading in that direction. “Thank you both,” he said, the words utterly rote, as they slung their towels over their shoulders and Sotha steered Lenet in the direction of an interior door.

As Sotha opened it, a wall of steamy air rolled out at them. He turned left, leading Lenet down a tiled corridor that grew warmer and more humid the further they walked. It opened before long into a wider room whose tiled walls alternated with banks of metal cubbies, each with two inner shelves. The door to each cubby was fitted with a lock, and in the lock of each open cubby was a key strung onto a lanyard. Benches, their wood heavily lacquered, stood about on the tiled floor.

Sotha removed his boots and placed them in a cubby’s lower shelf, then began to shuck his clothes without ceremony and lay them upon the upper shelf. Lenet followed his lead, though with less alacrity. He had been a courier since he’d turned thirteen, he’d not much modesty left, but he was still unsure of the wisdom of this adventure.

“Canst share the cubby with me,” Sotha said as he pulled his tashin sticks out, shaking his long black curls down over his dark-gray shoulders and back. Lenet stuffed his boots into the lower shelf beside Sotha’s, then piled his leathers, underclothes, and tashin sticks in atop his friend’s. Sotha shut the door tightly, turned the key in the lock, and strung the lanyard about his neck.

The floor was cool and damp under Lenet’s bare feet as the two of them passed through yet another interior door. The air that hit them was even hotter and moister now, and Lenet thought he could perceive a tinge of sulfur in it.

He had expected to see one enormous room, dominated by a nearly-as-enormous rectangular pool in which men were … frolicking, he supposed he’d have called it. Instead, he and Sotha seemed to have walked onto the perimeter of a great circular indoor canal that flowed, loudly burbling, about a round center. Only a small arc of it was visible from their spot by the door, the rest occluded not only by the center but by walls that were mostly archway. A foot of tiled floor on either side of the canal — the pool, Lenet corrected himself mentally — boasted towel racks and lacquered cabinets stacked with soaps and oils. The air was hazy with steam.

The pool’s edges looped and wavered, creating irregularly shaped and fairly deep alcoves. Lenet could see that each had a set of tiled steps in it that did not completely fill its space. Only one alcove within sight was occupied, that one by a solitary older man of apparent mixed blood who seemed to be dozing on the steps as the water washed around his legs. Four or five other men stood in the current, submerged anywhere from mid-chest to chin down depending on height. They turned to give Sotha and Lenet looks of appraisement far franker than any Lenet had received outside a marneise tavern.

“Afternoon,” Sotha called out over the rush of the water, draping his towel over a rack. He took a ball of soap from the nearby cabinet, then strode down one of two sets of steps that offered access into this arc of the pool on the door side. Lenet stood by the rack, nervously eyeing the other men.

“Afternoon,” one of them replied to Sotha. He was a slender goblin of middling height, perhaps in his early thirties, with rows of steel rings in his ears. He looked up at Lenet and said, a note of mischief in his voice, “Join us. None of us bite … unless ask’st nicely, of course.” The other men laughed.

Sotha, who had reached the bottom step and was now up to mid-chest, turned to give Lenet an incredulous look. Lenet shamefacedly relinquished his own towel, obtained his own ball of soap, and carefully began to step down into the water. He could see the other men’s eyes on his cock, which at that moment was about as tiny as it ever got when he wasn’t soaked to the skin in rain or snow, and he sent up a silent prayer of gratitude to Salezheio when the water began to rise above his hips.

The water buoyed him up more than he’d expected, and it was hot enough to make his head feel a bit light. Sotha, apparently unaffected by the heat, was lathering his body industriously while making small talk with the other men. Lenet began to rub his own soap between his wet hands, then, to wash himself. It was a nice soap, redolent of orange and lemon, and the suds felt silky against his skin. The water’s current seemed to wash them away almost as soon as he’d laid them on, yet he felt clean enough in their wake.

“Art done?” Sotha asked him mildly after perhaps five minutes. When Lenet nodded, Sotha placed his soap into a holder near the steps, which Lenet hadn’t spotted before, and said, “After me, Lenet. A pleasant afternoon, gentlemen.” With a nervous smile at the other men, Lenet followed his suit, half-walking and half-bobbing after him.

They passed through three archways along the pool’s curve. The further they got from the entrance, the more men were about, standing in the current, lounging against the wall, or … occupied in the alcoves. Said occupation was not entirely graphic if one was amid the current, owing to both the depths of the little spaces and the steam in the air, but neither was it mysterious. Nor did the sounds of conversation and rushing water completely conceal an occasional grunt or groan.

When Sotha finally stopped, there were at least two dozen men about in the water all around them, not counting those who had retreated to the semi-privacy of the alcoves. He glanced about, and before long his eyes seemed to settle upon an exquisitely pretty elf several men away. “Amuse thyself a while,” he said to Lenet.

“What? Don’t leave me alone here!” Lenet hissed.

Sotha turned back to him, and his glare could have withered an iron phallus of Anmura. “What think’st will happen, hare-heart?” he said under his breath. “The rest aren’t about to hold thee down and ravish thee as soon as mine attention is elsewhere. Just relax, folk-watch, make small talk or banter if art approached. Canst do all that well enough with clothes on.”

Lenet shot him a dark glare in return, but Sotha’s eyes had already drifted back to the elf, who had seen him as well and was smiling in welcome. He waded away from Lenet, leaving him standing by himself in the gurgling water. Fighting panic, Lenet waded to a bench set high into the pool wall, in between two alcoves, and sat himself upon it with his back pressed firmly against the tiles.

He watched Sotha and his new acquaintance chat for a few minutes, then move to an unoccupied alcove. He cursed silently. He and Sotha had fucked a few times before they’d decided they were a poor match. Sotha liked to take his time. An excellent thing for whomever was with him. Rather less so for Lenet just now.

“So you and that fellow are not a couple, then?” said a cultivated voice to his right. Lenet turned to find himself looking at a sharp-featured elf standing in the water to the right of the bench. At a guess, he was in his late twenties. The man’s ears were bare of jewelry, though they were pierced up their lengths as were most people’s. Nor did Lenet spy any rings on his hands, either the one braced against the wall or the one hanging lax by his side in the water.

“N-no, he’s a friend,” Lenet stammered.

“Ah.” The man’s eyes were a deep green. Judging by his pupils he rather liked the sight of Lenet, but beyond that his expression was inscrutable, as was his tone of voice. “Is this your first time here?”

 _Obvious, is’t?_ Lenet thought. He replied, “It is.” He was normally not comfortable around people who spoke like they were at court when they didn’t have to, but there was something oddly calming about this man’s voice. It was a tenor, pleasantly modulated.

“It’s rather nice, isn’t it?” It was half a question, half a statement.

“Well…” Lenet caught himself about to respond in the informal, as the men he and Sotha had first encountered in the pool had. But it would have been rude, when this fellow was giving him the courtesy of formal pronouns. “We cannot say we’ve any basis for comparison. It’s … clean, we suppose?”

There was a faint smile on the man’s lips now. “Which is very much a point in its favor. Not all such establishments are so fastidiously kept. One would think their owners would not want to provide the Vigilants with excuses to shut them down.”

Lenet flinched at the word _Vigilants_. There was a faint flicker in the man’s eyes in response. “Ha. No, one would think not,” Lenet replied rather lamely.

After a pause of a few seconds, the man asked, “So… are you local to Cetho, or are you visiting?”

“We’re a courier,” Lenet said. “We live in the dormitories. Originally we’re from Csedo, though we’ve been in the fleet for more than four years now.”

“Ah,” the man said again.

“And… are you local to Cetho?” Lenet asked.

“Yes, we are,” the man said, and though he was no less polite than before, there was a note of finality to his tone that did not welcome further questions into his background. Which, Lenet supposed, was entirely reasonable, given where they were. Perhaps the man was some sort of functionary at the Untheileneise Court, and it would have imperiled his career were it to get out that he frequented marneise bathhouses.

A loud groan issued from the alcove where Sotha and the other elf had retreated. Despite not being submerged, Lenet’s cheeks and ears immediately felt far hotter than any other part of him at the moment.

“They must be enjoying themselves quite a bit,” the man next to Lenet remarked. There was no dry humor to it, Lenet realized with a start; it was said softly, with a hint of longing. He caught the man’s eyes and gave another start — and, for the first time since he’d arrived at the baths, felt his loins begin to ache pleasurably.

“Wouldst like to enjoy thyself as well?” the man murmured.

The shift into the informal hit Lenet like falling masonry. “Er. Um.” _Well done, half-tongue. Very suave._

The man looked somewhat bemused. “Forgive me the impertinent question, but hast been with a man before?”

Lenet took a deep breath to clear his head. “No, forgive _me,_ please, for my witterings. I’m no virgin, no. But I … thou mentioned’st the Vigilant Brotherhood before. Do they … keep a close eye on establishments such as this?”

The green eyes widened fractionally in comprehension. The man said mildly, “If it would put thee at ease to know this, the owner of these baths pays them quite well not to.”

Relief struck Lenet as hard as lust had a moment before. He managed a weak grin. “Well. Don’t I feel the border bumpkin now.”

The man’s smile made his knees tremble. “Oh, merciful goddesses, don’t. A courier might’st be, but art still quite young.” He reached out now and smoothed two gentle fingers over Lenet’s lips. “And quite lovely, I might add.”

“Um.” Well, this at least was an excusable lapse of articulateness, given that all his blood had vacated his head for his groin at that feathery touch. “Thou … thou’rt quite lovely too.”

The man smiled broadly, and Lenet would have gladly fucked him out in the middle of Varevesena Boulevard for that alone. “Well. Shall we repair to the closest alcove, then?”

Lenet stared. “Er… dost not even wish to know my name? Wilt not tell me thine?”

A rich, soft chuckle, one that Lenet could have rolled himself up in like a bolt of velvet. “My sweet courier, hast not heard that at the baths one may take one’s pleasure unweighted by names or houses, titles or occupations?” He cupped Lenet’s face in one soft, smooth hand. “Here, I am just a body. A cock, or an arse, or a mouth, depending on the day or night. And so art thou.”

He leaned in, capturing Lenet’s mouth with his, and Lenet was certain he had never been kissed with such soft, promising deftness. Not even by Sotha, those few times early on. He scrabbled for the man’s shoulders, slipping off the bench and back onto his feet, and found himself kissing him fervently if not as skillfully back. The man tasted of mint leaves and a faint, honey-like sweetness, and he smelled of orange and lemon soap and a bit of iron too. His cock pressed hard against Lenet’s thigh, and though it was unlikely anyone else about would have objected, Lenet resisted the urge to reach down and grip it.

The man pulled away. His eyes were darkened now, his lips swollen and parted, his ears quivering faintly. Lenet throbbed from ear-tips to toes. “Come,” the man said, taking him by both hands.

They were no sooner inside the alcove than the man seized Lenet’s thighs and pulled his legs around his own hips. The water buoyed Lenet up almost completely, freeing the man’s hands to cup his buttocks and his fingertips to play teasingly at his cleft. “What lik’st?” he murmured against Lenet’s left ear, the inner surface of which he began to lick.

“Uhhhh…. that.”

Another velvety chuckle. “All right. That.” Another long lick. “And what else?”

“Uh … keep talking,” Lenet blurted. “I like thy voice.”

He immediately felt a fool again, but he also immediately felt the man’s cock swell even more against the back of his thigh. “Oh, dost thou? Better than my tongue upon thine ear?”

“Aye…” The word trailed off in a long groan as the man’s fingertips just barely slipped into Lenet’s hole. They lingered near the ring of muscle, stroking softly, in no hurry to stretch him. As much as Lenet would have welcomed a somewhat deeper intrusion and a bit of pressure, the caresses were delicious, soothing him even as they tantalized his nerves. Floating as much in the touches as in the water itself, he sighed and let his head fall onto the man’s shoulder, eyes closed, then sighed again as he felt lips brush his forehead.

“So, so pretty,” came the murmur after a while. “Thy face looks so sweet and innocent, even while I squeeze thy luscious round arse and finger thy little quivering hole. I cannot believe thy friend would abandon such a rare delicacy as thee to all the hungry men in the baths.”

Lenet gave a huff, partly in laughter and partly because one finger had finally sunk more deeply into him and was crooking. “Ah — it’s a — oh — long story,” he gasped.

“I’m sure it is,” the man chuckled, pressing harder. Lenet squirmed and moaned and clutched hard at his shoulders. “Mmm, my little dove coos so prettily, too. Wilt sound even prettier when I slide my cock into thee?” Lenet whimpered and pushed his arse against the man’s hand, and he was obliged by a firmer stroke deep inside his body. “Ah, yes, that’s it. It’s why didst come here, sweet courier: to be nothing but a hole eager to be fucked this afternoon.”

“Yessss,” Lenet hissed, bearing down on the hand that fingered him. He knew he should pace himself so he didn’t spill just from the man’s fingers inside him, but it were as if that entrancing voice were stroking him too, and it took all his willpower not to reach down and tug himself.

“And I must give thee what want’st, musn’t I? Art so young and aflame, wilt surely spend just from my teasing, wilt not?” The man took Lenet’s ear-tip into his mouth, and Lenet could have sobbed from both the hot, wet sensation of it and, conversely, because the man was no longer speaking.

Then suddenly neither his arse nor his ear was being attended to. The man was settling him upon a step just slightly above the water’s surface. Lenet let himself be arranged, thighs more slightly apart, hips tilted higher. He closed his eyes in anticipation of the round, blunt pressure against his hole, but for long seconds… nothing. Baffled and a bit annoyed, he opened his eyes again. The man was reaching for something set into a little niche in the alcove wall. Then there was a strong smell of sweet almonds and a slicker, somewhat more-perfunctory touch at Lenet’s entrance, before Lenet could feel his limbs be shifted again and then the man’s cockhead beginning to ease into him.

“Ah, takest me as perfectly as a glove,” the man whispered. “So exquisite around me, so hot and tight and slick.”

He did not hurry at all, and Lenet loved him for it, reveled in the feel of how aware he was being made of every inch as it sank into him. It was far from the largest cock he’d ever taken, but it did not matter. What mattered was how smoothly and slowly the man who wielded it moved; how his enchanting voice made every filthy, blush-inducing word he spoke sound like it was from a poem; how he punctuated his words with lingering licks at Lenet’s ears. Lenet held onto him and clenched around him and moaned and let himself be caressed by the man’s cock and mouth and voice.

He was glad, then, of the pause afforded them by the need for oil, because otherwise he was sure he would have spilled before the man was halfway inside him. As it was he did not last nearly long enough, only perhaps a dozen or fifteen thrusts before his ballocks were tightening and then another four or five before he began to spend. Distantly he could hear cries of pleasure from other alcoves, and as the man rocked into him he let himself cry out too, long and luxuriant, as his seed coated his own belly.

“Yes, yes, my sweet courier, spend’st so beautifully, wert made for this —” The lovely voice choked off in a gasp, and the long, leisurely thrusts became short and frantic. Lenet, floating on the waters of afterglow, let the man’s hips slam into his arse over and over again until he could feel shudders rippling through the warm, damp body pressed against his and hear a drawn-out moan against his ear. The man caught his breath, then pulled Lenet’s face toward his own, and for an eternity they were kissing, soft and wet and tender.

Lenet clung to him for a while after that, stroking his back and feeling him stroke his hair, the water’s flow sluicing the seed from their bodies to disappear into the ducts. Then he could feel the man easing himself backward and out of him. He forced himself to gather his wits, which his climax had scattered like beads from a snapped string. The man’s gaze was soft with satiation, but his expression was again the polite, friendly one with which he’d initiated the entire encounter.

“That was very nice,” he said. “If com’st here again and find’st me, I’d not at all mind a second go.”

“Um,” Lenet said. “Me either.” There was that smile again, which as far as Lenet was concerned could have fueled a second go for him right then and there, and then the man drifted out of the alcove without another word.

Lenet blinked. It certainly wasn’t the _most_ abrupt conclusion to fucking he’d ever experienced, but his experiences overall had tended to one opposite or the other: rough and dirty tumbles with little if any affection, or hours of lovemaking enmeshed in fervent clinging and murmured endearments. He supposed he’d expected any bathhouse encounter to be entirely of the first in nature. Ah, well, it wasn’t as if he had any complaints.

He pushed himself down off the step and bobbed out of the alcove — and blinked again to see Sotha, eyes incredulously wide, smile ridiculously broad, paddling in his direction.

“Hadst thyself a good time?” Lenet asked, and he hadn’t even gotten the last syllable out when Sotha clapped him hard on the shoulder. Had they not been in very buoyant water he would have staggered backward.

“Oh, I did — but probably not as good as thou.” Sotha’s grin was wicked.

Lenet frowned. “Hm? Dost know the man I … went into the alcove with?”

“Dost _not_ know the man thou wentst into the alcove with?”

“No, I’ve no idea who he is.”

Sotha laughed. “Lenet… thou just fucked’st Caventhis Rohethar.”

Lenet’s mouth dropped open. “The duke’s heir?!”

“The one and the same. And keep thy voice down, the water isn’t _that_ loud.”

“He was married just last month!” Lemet exclaimed more softly this time. “To Dach’osmin Lailo Ormevin!”

“Well, aye, he’s twenty-eight and it’s time for him to make some little heirs. Otherwise his noble sire might disown him entirely in favor of his brother, and then he’d have to go out and earn his keep like a commoner. What’s any of that to do with what his cock wants? And why look’st so woebegone of a sudden? I suppose it’s an improvement over looking like a snake in a suncat’s den, but in sooth shouldst be walking about with a silly grin for the next week.”

Lenet forced a smile. “Ah… well, I enjoyed it. I just feel sorry for him, that’s all.”

Sotha rolled his eyes. “Thou wouldst.”

***

Two weeks later, while Sotha was taking a message to the Corat’ Dav Arhos, Lenet stepped carefully down into the pool at the Gentlemen’s Baths, a key about his neck on a lanyard. He greeted the eight men who stood there half-submerged, and as he washed himself he made perfunctory conversation with them. Then he set the soap into a holder and half-swam, half-strode along.

One archway, two archways, three. More and more men, more and more admiring eyes upon him. _If dost not find him here, wilt take thy satisfaction with one of them instead?_ Lenet was unsure how to answer himself.

But find him there he did, leaning against the wall as before, green eyes softening at the sight of Lenet, ears unadorned, hands — right thumb — unweighted by any rings. Unweighted in his entirety, Lenet thought: by clothing, by name, by title, by duty. Returning his knee-weakening smile, Lenet waded to his side.

“My sweet courier has returned,” the man said so softly that it was almost lost in the rush of the water.

“He has,” Lenet replied, sliding his arms about the man’s neck. His face ached with his smile, his heart with his pity, and his loins with his desire as the man lifted Lenet’s chin to bring their mouths together.


End file.
